One reason for this may be that his stories bear witness to a desire to map the human psyche in all its endless variety. Is there perhaps a self-portrait in “The Tale of the Cabriolet,” the last story in the last collection, published two years before his death? Machado introduces us to a sacristan who is obsessed (yet another one) with hearing and collecting other people’s stories, not in order to approve or disapprove or to gossip about them, but for the sheer pleasure of the story itself, however mundane, bizarre, or terrible. This sounds very much like Machado himself, an avid and, yes, obsessive collector of other people’s lives.

Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson

MACHADO DE ASSIS

Augusta’s Secret

AUGUSTA’S SECRET

I

IT’S ELEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning.

Dona Augusta Vasconcelos is reclining on a sofa with a book in her hand. Adelaide, her daughter, is tinkering at the piano.

“Is Papa up yet?” Adelaide asked her mother.

“No,” Dona Augusta said, without glancing up from her book.

Adelaide left the piano and went over to her mother.

“But it’s so late, Mama,” she said. “It’s eleven o’clock. Papa does sleep a lot.”

Augusta put the book down on her lap and, looking at Adelaide, said:

“That’s because he came home very late.”

“I’ve noticed that now Papa’s never here to kiss me good night when I go to bed. He’s always out somewhere.”

Augusta smiled.

“You’re still such a country bumpkin,” she said. “You go to bed at the same time as the chickens. Things are different here. Your father has things to do at night.”

“Is it to do with politics, Mama?” asked Adelaide.

“I don’t know,” said Augusta.

I began by saying that Adelaide was Augusta’s daughter, and this information, so necessary to the story, was no less necessary in reality, because, at first sight, no one would ever have thought they were mother and daughter; Vasconcelos’s wife was so young that mother and daughter looked more like sisters.

Augusta was thirty and Adelaide fifteen, but, comparatively speaking, the mother looked even younger than the daughter. She still had all the freshness of a fifteen-year-old, as well as something that Adelaide lacked: an awareness of her own beauty and youth, an awareness that would have been praiseworthy were it not combined with a vanity that was as immense as it was deep. She was of only average height, but nevertheless cut an imposing figure. Her skin was, at once, very pale and very rosy. She had brown hair and green eyes. Her long, shapely hands seemed made for loving caresses. Augusta, however, put her hands to better use, covering them in soft kid gloves.